Giganews is proud to release the newest improvement to Giganews' premium Usenet service, the Giganews Accelerator.

The Giganews Accelerator is a software-based news proxy which will allow you to compress headers and enable 256-bit SSL encryption, regardless of whether or not SSL is supported natively by your news client. All authentication and commands are also encrypted, whether or not you have a Giganews SSL-enabled account. Encrypted authentication and commands improve your security and can help improve your download speeds when accessing Giganews. Header compression is especially helpful for users of news clients which download all headers the first time a group is accessed, such as Newsbin.

Features and Benefits

Header download compression for header downloads up to 10 times faster

Encode Usenet command traffic to work around packet sniffers and rate limiting

Compatible with any standard NNTP based Usenet newsreader

Release Notes

The Giganews Accelerator is easy to install and comes pre-configured for optimal use. You will need to update the news server settings in your news client based on the instructions listed below.

News client settings: Change the news server address in your news client to "localhost" and the news server port to “119”. This tells your client to pass all traffic to the Giganews Accelerator proxy. The Giganews Accelerator also handles all SSL traffic, so SSL must also be disabled in your client.

Note: If your client has any rate-limit settings, you should disable them. The Giganews Accelerator can rate-limit for you if necessary.

All other configuration information should remain the same, including the username/password and the maximum number of connections.

Other Useful Hints

Enabling / Disabling Header Compression: Header compression is done automatically through the Giganews Accelerator and is enabled by default. Header compression can be toggled by clicking the vise icon at the top of the window, or by going to "Options" and selecting "Compression." Header compression will start or stop when the next command from your news client is received. If you are updating headers when you toggle compression, the change will take effect when the next header update begins.

Enabling / Disabling SSL: You have the ability to turn SSL Usenet access on or off as you see fit by toggling the padlock icon at the top of the window, or by selecting "256-Bit SSL encryption" in the "Options" menu. SSL will not be toggled until your news client is completely disconnected and then reconnected. SSL encryption is enabled by default.

Setting Speed Limits (rate limiting): With the Giganews Accelerator you have more power than ever to control your Usenet access thanks to the rate limiting feature. Rate limiting allows you to set a speed limit for your Usenet traffic, which can be useful if you wish to browse the web while your client downloads articles, or conserve bandwidth due to ISP limitations.

To use rate limiting, click the speedometer button at the top of the client, enter the desired speed (in kilobits per second) in the box next to the icon, and hit the Enter key to apply the change. You can also go into "Options" and select "Rate Limits" to set a custom limit, or choose from a list of default limits. Unlike the other settings, changes to the rate limit are applied immediately.

Finally, it is important to note that if you use the header compression feature of the Giganews Accelerator, you should disable any speed / rate limits in your news client and enable Giganews Accelerator's rate limiting instead. This is because when the Giganews Accelerator's rate limiting is enabled, it is performed on all traffic it receives from our servers, and rate limiting from your client would only affect the decompressed stream it receives from the Giganews Accelerator.

Reporting Problems

If you experience any bugs while trying the application you can report problems by emailing support@giganews.com. In addition, if the program crashes, a copy of the crash dump data (containing no private data about your session, only information necessary to understand why the program crashed) will automatically be stored to your hard drive. You can e-mail this log to our support staff to help us further track down the problem.

Uninstalling the Giganews Accelerator

If you've installed the Giganews Accelerator and do not want to continue to use it, you can uninstall the application by using the Add/Remove Programs utility in your Control Panel.

You'll also need to set your news server address back to news.giganews.com in your news client. If you have an SSL-enabled account, be sure to set the port back to 563 or 443 in your newsreader to take advantage of SSL encryption.